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Frameworks for Unit Testing and Mocking

Unit testing has fortunately become an important issue in many software projects. The idea of automatic software based unit and integration tests is actually quite old. The typical Linux software that is downloaded as source code and then built with steps like
tar xfzvv «software-name-with-version».tar.gz
cd «software-name-with-version»
./configure
make
sudo make install

often allows a step
make test

or
make check

or even both before the
make install

It was like that already in the 1990s, when the word „unit test“ was unknown and the whole concept had not been popularized to the main stream.

What we need is to write those automated tests to an extent that we have good confidence that the software will be reliable enough in terms of bugs if it passes the test suite. The tests can be written in any language and I do encourage you to think about using other languages, in order to be less biased and more efficient for writing the tests. We may choose to write a software in C, C++ or Java for the sake of efficiency or easier integration into the target platform. But these languages are efficient in their usages of CPU power, but not at all efficient in using developer time to write a lot of functionality. This is ok for most projects, because the effort it takes to develop with these languages is accepted in exchange for the anticipated benefits. For testing it is another issue.

On the other hand there are of course advantages in using actually the same language for writing the tests, because it is easier to access the APIs and even internal functionalities during the tests. So it may very well be that Unit tests are written in the same language as the software and this is actually what I am doing most of the time. But do think twice about your choice.

Now writing automated tests is actually no magic. It does not really need frameworks, but is quite easy to accomplish manually. All we need is kind of two areas in our source code tree. One area that goes into the production code and one area that is only used for the tests and remains on the development and continuous integration machines. Since writing automated tests without frameworks is not really a big deal, we should only look at frameworks that are really simple and easy to use or maybe give us really good features that we actually need. This is the case with many such frameworks, so the way to go is to actually use them and save some time and make the structure more accessible to other team members, who know the same testing framework. Writing and running unit tests should be really easy, otherwise it is not done or the unit tests are disabled and loose contact to the actual software and become worthless.

Bugs are much more expensive, the later they are discovered. So we should try to find as many of them while developing. Writing unit tests and automated integrated tests is a good thing and writing them early is even better. The pure test driven approach does so before actually writing the code. I recommend this for bug fixing, whenever possible.

There is one exception to this rule. When writing GUIs, automated testing is possible, but quite hard. Now we should have UX guys involved and we should present them with some early drafts of the software. If we had already developed elaborate selenium tests by then, it would be painful to change the software according to the advice of the UX guy and rewrite the tests. So I would keep it flexible until we are on the same page as the UX guys and add the tests later in this area.

Frameworks that I like are actually CUnit for C, JUnit for Java, where TestNG would be a viable alternative, and Google-Test for C++. CUnit works extremely well on Linux and probably on other Unix-like systems like Solaris, Aix, MacOSX, BSD etc. There is no reason why it should not work on MS-Windows. With cygwin actually it is extremely easy to use it, but with native Win32/Win64 it seems to need an effort to get this working, probably because MS-Windows is no priority for the developers of CUnit.

Now we should use our existing structures, but there can be reasons to mock a component or functionality. It can be because during the development a component does not exist. Maybe we want to see if the component is accessed the right way and this is easier to track with a mock that records the calls than with the real thing that does some processing and gives us only the result. Or maybe we have a component with is external and not always available or available, but too time consuming for most of our tests.

Again mocking is no magic and can be done without tools and frameworks. So the frameworks should again be very easy and friendly to use, otherwise they are just a pain in the neck. Early mocking frameworks were often too ambitious and too hard to use and I would have avoided them whenever possible. In Java mocking manually is quite easy. We just need an interface of the mocked component and create an implementing class. Then we need to add all missing methods, which tools like eclipse would do for us, and change some of them. That’s it. Now we have mockito for Java and Google-Mock, which is now part of Google-Test, for C++. In C++ we create a class that behaves similar to a Java interface by having all methods pure virtual with keyword „virtual“ and „=0“ instead of the implementation. The destructor is virtual with an empty implementation. They are so easy to use and they provide useful features, so they are actually good ways to go.

For C the approach is a little bit harder. We do not have the interfaces. So the way to go is to create a library of the code that we want to test and that should go to production. Then we write one of more c-files for the test, that will and up in an executable that actually runs the test. In these .c-files we can provide a mock-implementation for any function and it takes precedence of the implementation from the library. For complete tests we will need to have more than one executable, because in each case the set of mocked functions is fixed within one executable. There are tools in the web to help with this. I find the approach charming to generate the C-code for the mocked functions from the header files using scripts in the a href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language)“>Ruby programming language or in the Perl programming language.

Automated testing is so important that I strongly recommend to do changes to the software in order to make it accessible to tests, of course within reason. A common trick is to make certain Java methods package private and have the tests in the same package, but a different directory. Document why they are package private.

It is important to discuss and develop the automated testing within the team and find and improve a common approach. Laziness is a good thing. But laziness means running many automated tests and avoid some manual testing, not being too lazy to write them and eventually spending more time on manual repetitive activities.